Launch of Sofia Pilot

FOOTHILL COLLEGE, Los Altos Hills, CA. - March, 2004.

Sofia, an open courseware initiative, is being launched by Foothill - De Anza Community College District, under the leadership of Foothill College's Distance Learning program with support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Modeled after MIT's Open CourseWare Initiative, Sofia will establish a system that encourages and supports the publication and free exchange of community college-level course materials on the World Wide Web.

The goal of Sofia is to publish "open" content on the web that covers most general education subjects taught at community colleges. Faculty from community colleges and four-year universities who have developed exemplary community college-level content, and are willing to share it openly with others, are encouraged to participate. By inviting faculty from a variety of institutions, the Sofia project will offer a breadth of learning models, teaching approaches, and depth of instructional material. The content published will be licensed under a Creative Commons License. Faculty will retain copyright of their materials that will be published in the Sofia site. The terms of attribution, distribution, and modification will be determined by the content authors.

"It is our hope that Sofia will lead to the exploration and adoption of new ways of delivering effective instruction and promoting student learning using freely-accessible web-based resources," says Vivian Sinou, Dean of Learning Technology & Innovations at Foothill College, and Executive Director of the Sofia Project.

Sinou's vision is shared by many faculty members. "Finally a place to share the best of the best!" exclaims Don Megill, Music Professor from Mira Costa College. "We have always suspected that something like Sofia would give us a place to nurture, develop, and share the new discoveries in teaching modalities."

Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) means wisdom in Greek. According to Aristotle, sofia is the "wisdom and intellectual virtue achieved when striving after the best ends and using the best means." The name reflects the idealism and philanthropic motivation behind the project.

"It is wonderful to see a project like Sofia that is meant to serve rather than profit from student learning," says Dave Megill, Music Professor from Mira Costa Community College who along with his brother, Don Megill, has won many awards for their high-quality online music courses, including CVC Awards in 2000 and 2002. Don and Dave Megill plan to contribute course content in the Sofia project.

Not all faculty members will be open to the idea of sharing their content freely with others. "Open content is a bold idea," admits Anne Margulies, Executive Director of MIT's OCW effort. Yet, an open content effort "aligns closely with the educational and public service missions of a non-profit institution of higher learning. More importantly, such an effort resonates deeply with faculty who have a passion for teaching and who have dedicated their lives to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge."

Clearly, the success of Sofia relies on wide faculty participation and a large pool of quality contributions of materials. Early inquiries indicate that there is interest and support for the vision of Sofia by community college faculty. Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean, Mathematics and Statistics Professors from De Anza College, who received a 2002 CVC Award for their online course in statistics, have already committed to contributing their exemplary course materials.

"I believe that our colleagues and universities will have many more hybrid and distance learning courses and will work together, through the materials in Sofia, to help students from a lot of different areas to obtain their degrees and career goals," says Susan Dean.

Barbara Illowsky is enthusiastic about Sofia, "I'm excited for how this will help ALL of our students - those in my classes, those in others' classes, those who miss a class, those who can benefit from hearing and seeing the "lecture" one more time outside of class." Susan Dean adds, "Open content opens up a whole new way to learn that is exciting, cost effective, and provides students with many more opportunities," reflecting on the potential of the Sofia project.

The Sofia project is not a distance learning or degree- or certificate-granting initiative and will not offer courses for credit or fees. Typically, web-based learning content is limited to those who register and pay for materials or course delivery. Sofia is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for-credit courses. Rather, the goal is to provide the content that supports an education. "Sofia fits into our 24/7 concept of learning and education," says Barbara Illowsky.

The Sofia open content will be published in ETUDES-NG, a course management system (CMS) that will be based on the Sakai open source software. "We hope that publishing open content in an academically-supported open source CMS product will lead to wider adoption and delivery of the materials by other institutions," says Sinou.

The Sofia initiative will begin with a proof-of-concept pilot that will showcase open content for a small set of subjects to be made freely available by the end of 2004. The pilot is the first phase of a five-year grant that Foothill-De Anza is exploring with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The long-term vision is to broaden participation in the initiative, promoting openness, sharing, and collaboration globally.

A call for participation in the Sofia pilot will be open through July 5, 2004. Faculty may participate as course content contributors or peer reviewers.
 

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